Taking an existential approach to his topic, Mathias Christensen has used photography to explore a rapidly changing capital over a period of two years. His photo series København (Copenhagen), which has previously been published in the national Danish newspaper Politiken and other media, is now presented in full in Black Nest, published by the German art photography publisher Kehrer Verlag and the Danish publisher Ajour.
Feeling lonely in a crowd
According to Mathias Christensen, the photo series København was inspired by the contrast-rich experience he had when he returned to his home city after an absence, an experience that fundamentally changed his perception of Copenhagen. He explains, ‘In 2011, I spent some time in the Swedish forests, and when I returned to Copenhagen later that summer, all my senses wide open, I was completely bowled over by the inferno of stimuli that hit me. I felt like a stranger and was struck by a sense of loneliness I had never known, and which I didn’t know was possible among so many people.’
In an attempt to understand and come to terms with the basic conditions of urban life, Christensen embarked on a journey into the nooks and corners of Copenhagen: ‘I began to wander Copenhagen aimlessly, with my camera, usually at night; sometimes I’d be gone for 12 hours, and most of the time I had no idea whom I was going to meet, or where I would wind up,’ he says.
‘At first I thought that I was exploring the urban universe and the discomfort it triggered in me. But later, I realized that, from the perspective of my own reality and my own perception, I was seeing something much more disturbing. I was looking at a state of being,’ Christensen concludes.
Dark aesthetic
With an insistent aesthetic, the 65 photographs that make up Black Nestunfold a dark and disorienting universe, where each motif is balancing on the edge between the world as we know it and distorted dream images. One moment, faces, buildings and bodies assume solid form; the next, they seem to dissolve in the grainy, black-and-white images.
‘As a photographer, I have always used very varying aesthetics and expressions, depending on the project. Black Nest is a dark universe, in both form and content, characterized by a sense of confusion, unease, chaos, sleep. The photo series revolves around a series of common existential themes and moods that I have sought to distil and highlight out of the obvious, which would hardly have caught our attention without a sharp aesthetic consistency,’ says Christensen.
